i7 3820 starts selling in Japan

Its the cheapest processor to date that Intel is going to be offering with its high performance LGA 2011 X79 platform. It is a quad core not a six core like the 3960X and 3930K. Spotted in Japan, these processors have started marketing in the shopping districts of Tokyo already at a retail price of $322 (25000 JPY). It is also worth noting we managed to find this processor on the recently taken-over company Overclockers for £249.95 and this makes the i7 3820 substantially cheaper than the second place model the 3930K which comes in at about £450. The box the i7 3820 has been seen in is very small, suggesting like with the 3960X and 3930K it will not come with any stock cooling and users will have to make do with third party solutions for cooling.

The Core i7-3820 is a quad-core part carved out of the Sandy Bridge-E silicon. It has four cores, and eight logical CPUs enabled with HyperThreading Technology. The chip is clocked at 3.60 GHz. Caches include 256 KB L2 per core, and 10 MB shared L3. The chip retains the quad-channel DDR3 IMC present on the more expensive six-core parts. It is also said to be “limited unlocked”, meaning it allows multiplier-assisted overclocking to a certain limit. The Core i7-3820 is not officially launched, though it should be unofficially supported by most socket LGA2011 motherboards based on the X79 chipset.